Showing posts with label Muslim community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Muslim community. Show all posts

Wednesday 18 November 2015

Trump brand of migrant demonization #2

English: The Ethnic composition of Muslims in ...
English: The Ethnic composition of Muslims in the United States, according to the United States Department of State based on the publication of Being Muslim in America as of March 2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The so called Christian American politicians John Kasich, Bobby Jindal, Rick Scott,
Rick Snyder, John Kasich, but also democrat Maggie Hassan have made declarations to refuse refugees, to see the South rising up to keep brown-skinned people out instead of in, not because they are overwhelmed by the refugee influx and find resources stretched to the limit.

These governors’ objections to the Obama administration’s resettlement plans revolve around the belief that Syrian refugees, the majority of whom are Muslim, have not been properly “vetted.”  So some of them could be ISIS operatives trying to sneak into America to launch terrorist attacks and weaken the country. (Ridiculously some wants American citizens to believe the black president is also a 'Hussein' Obama Islamic mole.) 

Many Americans do not seem to know or to believe that most of the plotters and attackers involved in the Paris slaughter were (so called) Muslims of French and Belgium origin. They did not come from an influx of people who tried to escape just the sort of violence which struck Paris last weekend.

Also the faith issue seems to have deeper wounds, because it is a matter of frustrated boys who did not find a place in our society but also not in the present Muslim communities. Whatever radicalisation they underwent has deeper roots in the societies of France and Belgium, where most of them lived. Will this have to mean that America is also going to stop any Belgian or Frenchman entering Belgium? Or are they prepared to stop anyone with a passport from a European country from coming into the United States of America?

The pope may look at those American politicians who try to create division between people who want to worship God. They want to let the Americans believe that all refugees are Muslim, which they are not, and that they are all extremists and dangerous for our society, which is not true. 

On Thursday September 24 in a historic address to Congress the pope had already called to open the hearts to new generations of immigrants.

Pope Francis’s passionate call for
 “as many young people as possible [to] inherit and dwell in a land which has inspired so many people to dream”
comes amid a fierce national debate over how to handle an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US.

“In recent centuries, millions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom,”
Francis told hundreds of lawmakers, cabinet members and supreme court justices in a packed joint session of Congress. It was the first time in history a pope had addressed the legislative body.
“We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners,”
 added Francis, who was born in Argentina to Italian parents.
 “I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descended from immigrants.”
What is also so contradictory is that most of those complaining about emigrating people to the United States are children of descendants from people who also emigrated from their country to look for better pastures. they too were people looking for a nicer place to stay. But often they were not fleeing such horror as those immigrants and refugees of war zones are today.

Perhaps it is good to remember those words spoken by the pope wo months ago:
“We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation,” he said.
“To respond in a way which is always humane, just and fraternal,”
 added Francis.
 “We need to avoid a common temptation nowadays: to discard whatever proves troublesome. Let us remember the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”
Speaking during Sunday Mass, November 15, the Pope expressing his
 "deep sorrow for the terrorist attacks that bloodied France late on Friday, causing many casualties."
condemned the Paris terror attacks, calling it "blasphemy" to use the name of God to justify "violence and hatred."
"We wonder how can it come to the heart of man to conceive and carry out of such horrible events",
 he said.
"The road of violence and hatred does not resolve humanity's problems. And using the name of God to justify this road is blasphemy."
Reading from Sunday's scripture, the Pope spoke of Jesus' preaching on the end of the world containing
"apocalyptic elements, like war, famine, and cosmic catastrophes."
Although he acknowledged these signs, he highlighted that they are not the most important things. Rather,
 "our final goal is the meeting with the resurrected Lord."
Rather than focusing on when or how the end will come, Francis compelled his audience to
 "live in the present."
For him we all should have the same goal, to meet the returned Messiah, who is a bringer of peace.
"This is our goal: this meeting. We do not expect a time or a place, but we encounter a person: Jesus."
At the end of the world, Francis said,
"Jesus' triumph will be the triumph of the cross, the demonstration that the sacrifice of oneself out of love for one's neighbour, in imitation of Christ, is the only victorious power and the only stable point in the midst of the upheavals and tragedies of the world."
This time imams in France and Belgium came out to tell the public those people are not real Muslims. They also wanted to warn their Muslim brothers that the violent reaction France took will not solve the problem but if some Muslims in turn would like to go to Syria they better think twice.  It is good that the public could see and hear the open public warning for the members of their community in France and Belgium that joining the jihadist group will only drag them to their death,
"to hellfire, because suicide and slaughter are not permitted in Islam."
Based from information shared by the French interior ministry, French nationals comprise the biggest number of European jihadis in Iraq and Syria with at least 570 of them fighting for ISIS.

Abdalali Mamoun, an imam at a southern Paris mosque, was one of 20 Muslim clerics who came to lay flowers near the Bataclan theatre where four terrorists wearing explosive vests killed more than 80 people during a rock concert. He urged young French Muslims to stay away from ISIS.
Another imam
Yasser Laouti, spokesman for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, said
"As French citizens, and as human beings, we have been wounded by this attack."
and made it clear that those terrorists were not afraid to kill Christians, Muslims and Jews indiscriminately.

However, the French Muslim leaders said that although they sympathise with the families of the terror attack victims, they do not support the French airstrikes in the ISIS capital of Raqqa, in Syria.
"I saw that yesterday, after what happened, Francois Hollande decided to bomb Raqqa,"
 human rights activist Samia Hathroubi said.
 "Do we really think that bombing a city of 200,000 people will help us combat terrorism in our own country?"
also Belgian imams expressed their concern for such actions which could bring more oil unto the fire.

On the different television channels everywhere comes up the same story of people who live here in our own regions but did not feel at their place because they seemed to be a stranger here but also in the land of their ancestors. Several have problems that though they are born in Belgium or in France they are still considered Moroccan, Turk, Tunisian, but never accepted as Belgian or French, though they often speak the dialects of the region where they live at.

The youngsters still do feel discrimination and often are a victim of poverty, political and economic marginalisation. This are some of the reasons why so many young Belgian and French Muslims are joining ISIS.

Americans like others should recognise that Muslim leaders throughout the world strongly condemned the terrorist attacks in Paris.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani sent a message of condolences to Hollande on Saturday, informing him Iran was offering its thoughts and prayers to the French people. Iran and its allies, Hezbollah and the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, have been fighting ISIS.

Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo also condemned the violence that took place in Paris, as he called for international cooperation against terrorism, according to the Jakarta Post. Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world.

The leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Egypt also denounced the attacks just hours after the attacks late Friday.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organisation in the United States, also joined in the condemnation, saying:
"These savage and despicable attacks on civilians, whether they occur in Paris, Beirut or any other city, are outrageous and without justification."
In YouTube video that became viral, one Moroccan Muslim named Wafi Abdouss blasted the ISIS terrorists, saying
 "these so-called jihadists only represent themselves."


*
Please do read also:
Cowardly governors give ISIS a propaganda victory: Refusing refugees is a moral outrage & a strategic blunder

+

Preceding article: Trump brand of migrant demonization

++

Additional reading
  1. Brussels-born Salah Abdeslam key suspect Paris terrorist attacks
  2. Refugee crisis, terrorist attacks and created fear
  3. Are people willing to take the responsibility for others
  4. If Europe fails on the question of refugees, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for
  5. State of Europe 2015 – Addressing Europe’s crises
  6. Schengen area and Freedom for Europeans being put to the test as never before
  7. The New gulf of migration and seed for far right parties
  8. Asylum seekers crisis and Europe’s paralysis
  9. Can We Pay The Price To Free Humanity?
  10. What we don’t say about the refugee crisis?
  11. Human tragedy need to be addressed at source
  12. Poster: Please help the refugees
  13. Real progress leaves nobody behind
  14. Swallowed in the Sea but belonging to earth
  15. The natural beauties of life
  16. How to make sustainable, green habits second nature
  17. Vatican meeting of mayors talking about global warming, human trafficking and modern-day slavery
  18. Republican member of Congress from Arizona to boycott pope’s address over climate change
  19. Vatican against Opponents of immigration 
  20. Welfare state and Poverty in Flanders #12 Conclusion

+++

Monday 13 April 2015

Wrong ideas about religious terrorism

Al-Fatiha Muslim Gays - Gay Parade 2008 in San...
Al-Fatiha Muslim Gays - Gay Parade 2008 in San Francisco (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Lots of people do have a wrong idea about the amount of religious terrorism. Most badly affected is the Muslim community which has to cope with the bad name those fools of ISIS do give them.

Belgium and the United Kingdom have seen many people recruited, surprisingly also several women to come to Syria and help the jihad. The present going on series about those recruitments on BBC is a must see.

We can not ignore those militant groups in Muslim countries who make a big effort to radicalise and recruit Muslims living in the West. They even use for it a British girl from Birmingham to do that. West Europe has seen many leaving their capitalist soil for what they call the good cause. The United States of America looked at those happenings with a magnifying glass and got a terrible fear that  large-scale terrorist would strike on their home soil.

Such fears, however, have been largely unfounded, because Muslims in the United States have overwhelmingly ignored the calls to militancy, said Charles Kurzman, a researcher with the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security in North Carolina.
“We have not seen mass radicalization of Muslims in the United States,”
he said.
As part of a Triangle Center study, Kurzman, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill who researches Islamic movements, tallied a total of 250 American Muslims who have been arrested for — or who have engaged in — acts that might be called terrorism since 2001. That’s out of an estimated population of 3 million Muslims in the U.S.

Kurzman’s study found that the death toll as a result of all their plots was 50 — over a period of time in which 200,000 people were murdered in the United States.
Although comparisons are tricky, other studies suggest that right-wing violence claimed more lives in the U.S. than terrorism committed in the name of Islam.

There have been serious attacks, of course.  The 2009 shooting at the Fort Hood military base in Texas and the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon were carried out by Muslim U.S. citizens who claimed to be avenging American military actions overseas.

Though we must not exaggerate such a Muslim violence and should be well aware there is much more intern violence by non-believing people going on. When we look at the figures for Belgium religious violence is negligible with less than 0.14% of more than 700 terrorist attack in one year. The only thing is that often such Muslim fed terrorism gets more attention in the media. Cases as the attack around the Charlie Hebdo got the fantasy of many heads turning wild.

Also in the United States there are less Muslim American terrorism suspects the last few years than two decades ago. Kurzman said the numbers have actually been declining, and over the last couple of years there have been almost no plots aimed at the United States.  Most of those arrested recently on suspicion of terrorism were attempting to travel to Syria or Yemen to join groups that the U.S. government considers terrorist organizations.

David Schanzer, a Duke University expert on homegrown terrorism who directs the Triangle center, said that while federal authorities spend “a disproportionate amount of energy” thinking about domestic terrorism, local police departments across the country have other things on their minds.
“They very much realize that the things that are threats to public safety in their communities are much more things like drugs, gangs, domestic violence,” he said.
+

Please find to read:
Acts of Terrorism Very Rare Among US Muslims, Study Finds
Of old and new ideas to sustain power and to feel good by loving to be connected and worship something
++

Please do find additional reading:

  1. Newsweek asks: How ignorant are you?
  2. Atheists, deists, and sleepers
  3. Being Religious and Spiritual 2 Religiosity and spiritual life
  4. Being Religious and Spiritual 6 Romantici, utopists and transcendentalists
  5. Epicurus’ Problem of Evil
  6. Economics and Degradation
  7. Evil Never Ceases
  8. Caricaturing and disapproving sceptics, religious critics and figured out ethics
  9. Subcutaneous power for humanity 5 Loneliness, Virtual and real friends
  10. A world with or without religion
  11. , Being Charlie 2, Being Charlie 3, Being Charlie 4, Being Charlie 5, Being Charlie 6,Being Charlie 7, Being Charlie 8, Being Charlie 9, Being Charlie 10, Being Charlie 11
  12. It’s beautiful to watch the spread of #JeSuisCharlie across the world,
  13. Where do we stand in the backdrop of Charlie Hebdo Massacre ?,
  14. Charlie Hebdo, offensive satire and why ‘Freedom of Speech’ needs more discussion
  15. Faith because of the questions
  16. Religion, fundamentalism and murder
  17. Religion…..why the competition?
  18. Shariah and child abuse – Is there a connection?
  19. Why is it that Christians don’t understand Muslims and Muslims do not understand Christians?
  20. Apartheid or Apartness #1 Suppression and Apartness
  21. Leaving the Old World to find better pastures
  22. Built on or Belonging to Jewish tradition #2 Roots of Jewishness
  23. Built on or Belonging to Jewish tradition #3 Of the earth or of God
  24. Collision course of socialist and capitalist worlds
  25. Robertson: God says U.S. will accept socialism
  26. Christian fundamentalism as dangerous as Muslim fundamentalism
  27. The imaginational war against Christmas
  28. Autumn traditions for 2014 – 4 Blasphemy and ridiculing faith in God
  29. Still Hope though Power generating long train of abuses
  30. Europe and much-vaunted bastions of multiculturalism becoming No God Zones
  31. 112314 – A Peculiar People
  32. Maker of most popular weapon asks for repentance
  33. Science, belief, denial and visibility 2
  34. Science, 2013 word of the year, and Scepticism
  35. 2013 Lifestyle, religiously and spiritualy
  36. 2014 Religion
  37. Not many coming out with their community name
  38. Truth, doubt or blindness
  39. A Church without Faith!
  40. Inequality, Injustice, Sustainability and the Free World Charter
  41. Re-Creating Community
  42. Daniel Guérin: Three Problems of the Revolution (1958)
  43. The trigger of Aurora shooting
  44. Intellectual servility a curse of mankind
+++

Sunday 9 February 2014

Cheltenham Road cinema from Christadelphian to Islamic Centre

In 1914 a cinema was designed by Stokes Croft local architect William Henry Watkins and was originally called the Cheltenham Cinema.
The Cheltenham Road cinema was considered one of the grandest in the city.
Although it changed its name several times, the building was used as a cinema until 1955 when it was converted into a church by the Christadelphian community.
After 44 years having been a place for Bible study and prayer, the community sold the building to  the JD Wetherspoon pub chain in 1994. At the time of the sale the former cinema was given listed building status.
The building was converted and an extension added and was renamed The Magic Box. The pub closed in 2006 and in 2007 planning permission was granted to turn the pub into a comedy club.

As in other parts of Europe the Muslim community is growing and they need places to bring their people together. This way a planning application has been lodged with the city council to convert the boarded-up building on Cheltenham Road into an Islamic Centre.

A spokesperson for the Assahaba group said: “This proposal will enhance the listed building and the setting. It will enable the listed building to be brought back into use with the significant features of listed building retained.
“The building can accommodate the proposed new use and the building has formerly successfully been used as a place of worship.”




Please do find:
Bristol comedy club Jesters could now become mosque +

+++
 

Enhanced by Zemanta